Fedora Core 6 Zod Review

“We have already used Fedora Core 6 Zod for several days now and have been extremely pleased by this release. The changes are extensive from default AIGLX + Compiz support to a great deal of performance improvements. Another nice feature is the immediate availability of Extras packages built for Fedora Core 6”.More here.

I have installed it and found that NIC worked fine with firefox being able to view all web sites and my samba network browsing was fine too; but software updates was not successful.

Error message I recieved was:

“Cannot open/read repomd.xml file for repository gst-0.10-apps”

Which stopped me from installing packages from locally available ones on the DVD.

DVD.iso passed sha1sum and DVD+R disk passed mediacheck test of fedora; but had problems with unability to read a file from the DVD and unability to see CD 99?!!

If this is to be the true DVD from fedora then they missed up everything; I will wait to download the DVD.iso from fedora web site with fedora sha1sum files when it will be available. I will report then.

Just a guess, but I would say update repos are probably not available until Zod is officially released which is at 1400 GMT, or 6 AM PDT. So that would be a little over 6 hours from now. Just a guess, as it would make no sense to have any updates or repos available until the official release time.

Installing FC6 onto a XFS filesystem seems borked. For me, the installer did not create a sane XFS root partition, causing lots of errors to pop up during the first boot. Probably caused by some erroneous calculation of the partition size or something like that.

Solution (for me):

1. Boot into rescue mode

2. Build the partitions manually

3. Format the partitions manually using XFS

4. Restart, and boot from the CD/DVD again

5. When the installer asks to format the partitions again, say no, and request to have it mounted only

BTW. You can install FC6 onto a XFS partition using the xfs boot flag.

“I will wait to download the DVD.iso from fedora web site with fedora sha1sum files when it will be available”

I recommend downloading the torrent, it is hashed already so it is a reliable source and it doesn’t use so much of the fedora project’s bandwidth. There was a reference to this on the fedora website somewhere.

Ok, I’m surprised one of you geeks didn’t catch this mistake. Zod did NOT destroy Superman’s home world. The seismic instability of Krypton’s core is what destroyed the planet. Zod was one of several arch criminals who were exiled to the Phantom Zone by Superman’s dad, Jor-El. He frequently escapes to cause Superman great strife on Earth. In any case, i’m sure he uses Fedora!!

The review mentions windows wobble and something about a cube. I have no idea what those are, the review doesn’t elaborate and the screenshots weren’t helpful. The most I can figure about windows wobble is that it’s something drunk people might like. Can anyone help me out?

You can always rely on google for those sort of thing. But don’t ask if it makes you more productive, or why would anyone want that. It’s just cool and makes us believe we’re in the OSX/Vista eye candy competition.

Window wobble: when you drag a window and then let go of it, it will wobble back and forth for a second like it is a piece of jello. Not useful at all, but it does look neat for a little while. Until you get tired of it.

Cube: the virtual desktops are mapped onto the sides of a cube, so that when you switch to another you can see the animation of a cube rotating around. You can also sort of see 2 virtual desktops at a time if you drag the cube halfway around and look at it on the edge.

Eventually got FC6 (64-bit) onto my machine and had a play. Spotted quite a few issues:

* I can’t completely delete a comment from a GNOME task bar icon’s Comment field (right click on icon, then select Properties and delete all chars from the Comment field, click on Close and then hover over the icon again – original comment is still there!).

* Both 32-bit and 64-bit Firefox seem to have been installed and neither RPM can be easily replaced (too many dependencies on them) e.g. by a home-built Firefox 2.0 RPM I had to hand. What’s worse is that a) there’s no way to directly run 32-bit Firefox (e.g. why no “firefox.i386″ soft-link or something) and if you hack /usr/bin/firefox and remove the MOZ_LIB_DIR=”/usr/lib64” if clause, you can run 32-bit Firefox, but the menu items appear white on grey aka unreadable 🙁 ).

* livna enabled nicely (see rpm.livna.org for instructions), but then they’ve currently got a broken 64-bit kmod-ntfs (the common package is missing) 🙁

* Used livna to enable ATI stuff for 3D (kmod-fglrx), only to find that it generally didn’t work nicely with AIGLX. Anyone else noticed this (64-bit platform remember)? I’m back to the original radeon driver for the moment (I strongly suspect the “aticonfig” command is extremely dodgy – I really didn’t like the stuff it did to xorg.conf…).

* Azureus (in Fedora Extras) doesn’t let you install additional plug-ins, which makes it 100% useless (e.g. I use Speed Scheduler cos I get quotaed during peak times). Back to downloading Sun’s Java and the original Azureus as usual, ho hum (just spotted that has white menu text on grey too, hmmm…). BTW, the /usr/share/icons/hicolor/64×64/apps/azureus.png icon really shouldn’t have a light blue shaded background – this is surely a mistake because the bg turns up on the task bar and looks way out of place.

* Am I the only one who’d like to see some built-in support for popular PCI TV tuner cards/USB TV tuner sticks in Fedora? Yes, you can hack away like a demented rabbit trying to get the stuff to work and eventually spring the device into life, but distros like OpenSUSE just spot the device during install and appropriately enable it. Why can’t Fedora? Yes, I understand about firmware issues, but can’t they be resolved by having those downloadable on-the-fly from some third-party source such as livna (in order to keep the official Fedora repos “free”)?